


Cuts Like a Knife

by StilesBastille24



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Angst, Different Types of Love, Everybody Lives Nobody Dies, Get Together, M/M, POV-Bucky Barnes, post-AoU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-14
Updated: 2015-10-14
Packaged: 2018-04-26 09:07:44
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,645
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4998946
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/StilesBastille24/pseuds/StilesBastille24
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Pietro shrugged. “The four of us, we would be invincible, because the ties that bind us to this world are not memories or dreams, they are a single strand, one that is tied unequivocally to another person. If she dies, I die, and the world shall die with us.”</p><p>“That’s insane,” Bucky huffed out a dark laugh. “That’s not a normal way to think or feel.”</p><p>“That is love,” Pietro said unapologetically.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Cuts Like a Knife

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Bryan Adam's song of the same name. For no particular reason other than I thought the words fit the piece. This story isn't about happy go lucky love. This is about the love that builds you up and tears you apart when it's gone. It's about the kind of love you don't really believe in until you're already in so deep there's no turning back. And that's sounds melodramatic because it probably is, but it was still fun to write.

A few weeks after the bewildering battle against Ultron, Bucky showed up in Steve’s new Brooklyn apartment. He’d seen the news footage of the battle. He’d seen Steve up on a fucking floating city waiting to crash back down to earth. Consequently, he needed to see Steve alive, with his own eyes. Apparently watching Steve battle it out in his Captain America gear and not always looking like he was going to win, was enough to jog Bucky’s memory back to where it should be. 

Two months after showing up like a nightmare in Steve’s unlit apartment, Steve had two more phantoms he wanted to welcome into his home. When Bucky met the twins, he understood immediately why Steve had been so awkwardly protective of them. Awkward, in the sense that he had kept trying to placate Bucky on why they needed to open their apartment up to a pair of strangers even though Bucky had never questioned it. 

If Steve wanted to do an exchange student program of the superhero kind, then Bucky was doing it with him, because they shared an apartment and when Steve looked at you with his pleading ‘I’m trying to do the right thing’ eyes, it was a human impossibility to say no. 

There had been other considerations for Bucky as well, like if the twins weren’t quite as non-evil as Steve wanted to believe, then Bucky would be there to eliminate the threat that Steve wouldn’t be able to. Because Bucky had heard the way Steve was talking about the twins and he was so full of affection and hope that there was no way he would do anything to hurt them. That was fine, Bucky was used to doing the things Steve couldn’t do or didn’t want to. That’s how they had always been. 

Meeting the twins though? That cleared everything up in a way Bucky hadn’t quite been prepared for. Wanda and Pietro Maximoff were in the living room, turned into each other on the couch, speaking in quiet hurried German about their new accommodations. Steve and Bucky were not so subtly observing them from the kitchen. 

Bucky’s face was blank. “They’re – “ he cut a look to Steve then back to the twins. “Steve, that’s –“

“I know,” Steve said, his voice flat, but Bucky knew his best friend well enough to hear the finely hidden excitement. 

Wanda’s hands were glowing red; Pietro reached over, covering her hands with his, and lowering them gently into his lap. She sighed, head leaning forward to rest against his shoulder. The intimacy, unquestioned, made Bucky itch. 

“Hope you don’t mind the couch,” Steve said, striding back into the living room, two mugs of hot chocolate in his hands. 

Bucky lifted an eyebrow, following after him with two bottles of beer. He watched the twins’ eyes slide from one drink option to the other. 

With a ruffle of wind and nothing more, both beers were gone from Bucky’s hand and Pietro was on the couch, passing one over to his sister. Bucky tried, genuinely attempted, not to smile. He failed. These kids were awesome. 

Well, not that inducing hallucinations was awesome, because Bucky was on the firm boat of not tampering with anyone’s mind, but the metal bending, and the supersonic speed, Bucky could get behind that. 

Steve watched the pair of them crack open the beers and take a long drink. He glanced down at the two mugs still clasped in his hands, he smiled, but it was slightly sad too. With a sigh, Bucky reached over with his metal hand and pried one mug from his hand. He took a drink, meeting Steve’s eyes over the rim. 

Steve’s smile instantly perked up and he lifted the second mug to his own lips. The shit Bucky did for this asshole was unending. Suffering through a mug of powdery hot chocolate because Steve never stirred it for long enough, was just one thing in a long list. 

Wanda watched them, her eyes outlined in so much Kohl she looked perpetually on the brink of crying. “You are the Winter Soldier?” she asked, addressing Bucky for the first time, her words blurred over by her accent. 

Steve tensed and shifted his weight so he was partially in front of Bucky, blocking him from their guests. Bucky gave a tight nod. “I was. Not by choice.”

Wanda nodded. “We made our choice,” she said. “I’m not always certain it was the right one.”

Posture relaxing, Steve motioned for Bucky to drag over the two barstools from the kitchen. Bucky did so. “You wanted to protect yourself and your people, that’s never the wrong choice,” Steve said, once he was seated, knees spread wide so that his right one was bumping into Bucky’s. 

“It didn’t go exactly according to plan,” Pietro said with false levity. 

“Nothing with Hydra does,” Steve said. 

Bucky glanced at his arm, the metal reflecting into the soft lights of the apartment. The plates whirred quietly as his fingers clenched around the handle of coffee mug. He looked up to see Wanda watching him. 

“Was the arm a gift or weapon?” she asked, setting her beer down on the coffee table, the red sweater wrapped around her arms slipped down over her shoulders, revealing the black sleeves of her dress. 

Bucky liked her because she wasn’t put together. He liked her because her eyes were Kohl rimmed for battle not for beauty. He liked her because her hand went to Pietro’s knee and stayed there. He liked her because he understood her. 

“It was intended as a weapon,” Bucky answered. “I’m choosing to use it as a gift.” He felt, rather than saw, Steve’s quirked smile. 

“They kept us separate,” Wanda said, fingers tightening their grip of Pietro’s knee. “Ten years, they kept us in cells beside one another, but never touching, never seeing. We went to them at sixteen, desperate to help our people and for ten years, I didn’t see my brother. That was their kindness to me.”

Pietro’s arm swung around her shoulders, pulling her close, and he pressed a hard kiss to her forehead. “We are together now, little sister,” he said determinedly. 

Bucky felt the itch beneath his skin again, the one that begged him to reach out and drag Steve close, to feel his heart beat beneath his chest, to run his hand through Steve’s hair just to feel that he was really there. 

“When Bucky left for the war,” Steve said slowly, placing his empty mug on the coffee table, “I was offered the chance to become someone else, someone better.”

Bucky huffed at that proclamation, knocking his knee into Steve’s because that was bullshit. “Thought you had nothing to prove,” he said, turning his face to watch Steve’s profile as he told this story. 

“I lied,” Steve said effortlessly. “I wanted to fight the good fight, I wanted to protect people who couldn’t protect themselves, I wanted to be someone who could make a difference. So when Dr. Erskine, offered me the chance to do all of that, I said yes. I didn’t question the risks, I didn’t question the science, I said yes and took the pain because I wanted so badly to be that other person.”

The twins were listening with rapt attention. Bucky though, felt himself slipping through time. Saw himself writing letter after shitty letter to Steve and getting those short little replies. Nothing ever that would have clued him into what his best friend was joining up with. 

Steve was talking about how those choices didn’t make him a better or worse person, that they were his choices to become who he believed he needed to be to help others. Bucky was thinking about the man who had rescued him from Zola’s lab. The man who was both Steve and not Steve. The man who looked exactly how Bucky had always seen Steve, brave, fierce, and strong. 

“I realized,” Steve was saying, “when they told me about the 107th, that what I had never realized was that I said yes to the experiment because it was the only way I could be there with Bucky.”

Bucky’s head jerked up, his eyes slashing across to Steve. “What?”

Steve shrugged, self-conscious, fingers interlaced between his knees. “I’d known you my entire life, Buck, and suddenly you weren’t there anymore and there was no way to get to you. So beneath all the other reasons I became Captain America, I became him to get back to you.”

“That’s the stupidest shit I’ve ever heard,” Bucky said tightly. 

“The truth isn’t always glamorous.” Steve glanced at Bucky from the corner of his eyes, then refocused his attention on the twins. “What I mean is, I get it. Why you did what you did, why you became who you are, and I respect that.” 

“And the others,” Wanda asked, “do they feel as you?”

“They will,” Steve assured firmly.

Bucky stood up, no longer in the mood for old war stories. He carried his mug into the kitchen sink, then pushed up the window and climbed out it, onto the fire escape. It wasn’t a dignified exit, but he didn’t particularly care. He raced up the rattling metal stairs with ease until he reached the roof, sinking down on the blackened concrete, knees pulled up tight to his chest. 

He had only been there for about ten minutes, bleakly reflecting on Hydra and it’s propensity to destroy what should have been beautiful, when the sharp rustle of the air gave way to Pietro sitting next to him. 

“Your friend is worried,” Pietro said, legs sprawled out in front of him, arms arched back to prop himself up. 

Bucky frowned. “Steve’s usually worried about something.”

“Perhaps,” Pietro allowed, “but I think tonight he is worried about you. It’s not kind to let blood worry.”

“We ain’t blood,” Bucky corrected rather too harshly.

Pietro smiled. “Isn’t it the same thing? I protect Wanda because she is my sister, my twin, the other side of my soul. Do you not do the same for him?”

When Bucky didn’t answer, Pietro continued on unperturbed. “What Hydra made us? It is a gift. I can protect her better than ever now, and she can do the same. We shall never be weak, we shall never suffer at the hands of others without the ability to deliver swift retribution. That is love, at its fiercest. Do you not feel it?”

“That’s why you’re here, isn’t it?” Bucky countered, feeling cornered and not entirely sure why. “Steve saw you and Wanda but he really saw us.”

Pietro inclined his head in agreement. “With our stories so intertwined, how could he not? So why does it anger you, then, his truth?”

“Because – “ Bucky bit off. “Because Steve has always made reckless decisions. I didn’t want to be one of them.”

“Would you rather he had not done it? From what I know, you would be all alone now then.”

He stared hard at Pietro. “You went into it together. You knew you would either die together or come out together. You were split apart after that decision. It wasn’t the same for us. I left first and Steve came back for me. There was no mutual decision. I left, he came back, I fell, he fell, I came back, he came back, we’re always playing catch up.”

“Is that what you’re worried about?” Pietro asked curious. “That you will fall again and he will tumble down after?”

“He has always tumbled after me and I have always tumbled after him,” Bucky said firmly. “I would burn everything down to find him and what the world doesn’t seem to understand is that Steve would do exactly the same.”

Pietro shrugged this off. “I understand. So does Wanda. The four of us, we would be invincible, because the ties that bind us to this world are not memories or dreams, they are a single strand, one that is tied unequivocally to another person. If she dies, I die, and the world shall die with us.”

“That’s insane,” Bucky huffed out a dark laugh. “That’s not a normal way to think or feel.”

“That is love,” Pietro said unapologetically. “When you’re soul lives half in you and half in another, all these other things, they fall by the wayside. I don’t care what happens to the world as much as I care about what happens to her. I will protect the world because she is in it, I will protect the people who inhabit this world because that is what Wanda wants us to do. But in every split soul, one is the leader and one is the avenger. Wanda leads us and I follow.”

Pietro’s words rang so true, Bucky’s heart ached. The four of them, they were two sides of the same coin. Steve had seen that the moment he met the twins. Not just Hydra, not just the experiments that gave them their abilities, but something so much stronger and dangerous than that. Something fierce and dark and powerful. 

Steve had told Bucky, not long after he had appeared in Steve’s apartment, that Tony Stark had taunted him about not having a dark side. Steve had looked hard at Bucky. “He doesn’t know what I would do to get to you.”

And Bucky had watched him, the fire in his eyes, and wondered for the first time what Steve did after he fell from the train. So he’d asked.

“I burned Hydra to the ground and myself with it,” Steve had answered simply. As if it should have been obvious. As if there was no other possible choice. 

“Is love supposed to be that deadly?” Bucky asked Pietro, bleakly curious.

Pietro shrugged, lifting his arms up and stretching them. “I do not care what love is for others. I only care what love is for me and for Wanda.”

With nothing left to say, they fell into silence until even the city noises below them had tapered off into mere murmurs. When they eventually made their way back to the apartment, Wanda was asleep on the pull out couch, a quilt tucked up carefully around her. Pietro smiled, kicking off his sneakers and clambering in beside her. 

“You snore,” he whispered into her hair. Reacting to his voice, Wanda’s hand reached across the mattress to ensnare his. 

Bucky made his way around the darkened apartment, pausing at Steve’s bedroom door. He raised his hand to knock then wavered. It didn’t matter, the door pulled open from the other side and Steve’s hand grabbed a fistful of Bucky’s white t-shirt, dragging him inside. 

“Can they stay?” he asked, voice pitched quiet as if to not disturb their guests down the hall. 

“They’re nuts,” Bucky said, then smirked, “I like them.”

Steve’s shoulders sagged with relief. “You see it, though, right?”

Bucky rolled his eyes, metal arm tugging Steve’s hand free of his shirt. “Course I see it. I could be blind and deaf and still see it.”

“Fury doesn’t trust them, they need somewhere safe to stay until he does,” Steve continued. 

“Then they’ll stay here. I can shack up with you, if you want to give them my room. Couch cushions on the floor, like we were kids,” Bucky said, echoing a sentiment that seemed only a handful of years back but in reality was decades.

Steve shook his head. “The bed’s big.”

Bucky made a face. “You still kick in your sleep, pal, and you can bruise me a lot harder now than you could back then.”

“I won’t kick,” Steve said, his lips pulling down in a pout that should have looked ridiculous but made Bucky smile instead.

“Sure. I’ll believe that when I see it.” He reached forward, pulling Steve with him onto the edge of the mattress. “They’re dangerous, you know that, right, Stevie?”

Steve nod was curt. “So are we.”

Bucky frowned. “Only four people understand the things we’d do, the dangerous, stupid things we’d do for each other, Steve. And they are all in this apartment right now. Not sure that makes you’re point a good one.” 

“Natasha and Sam know too,” Steve disagreed. 

“But you think they’d stop us? If something happened to one of us, do you really believe they would try to stop the other? Stop us from destroying everything in our path? Because they know what it’s like too, Steve. Natasha has Clint, Sam had Riley.” He looked up through his curtain of shoulder length hair to gauge Steve’s expression.

Steve was looking particularly stubborn, the kind of stubborn that led to bloody knuckles in alleyways. “That’s the point. They understand.”

Bucky sighed knowing he wasn’t going to win this argument tonight. “We can keep Orphan Annie and her loyal dog Sandy.”

Steve frowned. “Bucky.”

“What? Seemed appropriate,” he teased.

Steve socked him in the shoulder but the shadow of a smile was playing at the side of his mouth. “We can make this work, I’m sure of it.”

“Sure,” Bucky allowed, lying back on the bed and throwing his metal arm across his eyes to block out the overhead light.

“You know,” Steve started hesitantly, “Wanda asked me something.”

“Was it something dirty?” Bucky teased, just to be an asshole. He received an elbow to the ribs for his efforts. 

“Shut it, jerk.” 

When Steve didn’t continue on his own, Bucky prompted him with a lazy gesture of his right hand. “She asked – she asked why we weren’t together.”

Bucky waited for further explanation on that, but none was forthcoming .He resigned himself to sitting back up. “Together how? We share the apartment.”

“Together together,” Steve said as if that clarified anything.

“Right,” Bucky said, dragging out the word sarcastically. “I’m following you entirely. This is me understanding all of the things you aren’t saying. Can you see that?”

Steve shoved him again, but this time left his hand against Bucky’s thigh and Bucky thought he might understand what Steve meant now. “Wanda said when she showed me her red world, she thought I would have been happier. That I should have taken to the dream and been spun out on it. She said she didn’t understand why when Peggy was there I was still looking for someone else.”

Steve’s cheeks were getting redder by the second and Bucky could feel his own heating up as well. “Yeah, well, what does she know?”

“A lot. She can read your thoughts, Bucky. She knew exactly who I was looking for and why the war being over wouldn’t be enough to hold me.” He looked sideways at Bucky, pleading for him to finish the sentence. 

Bucky didn’t trust himself to, though. This was territory they had never encroached before. What they had was enough, had always been enough. But here was Steve, pulling at a very dangerous thread. He wasn’t sure if he wanted Steve to, if he was ready for them to unravel that way. 

Steve didn’t give him a choice, focusing his attention on his knees and putting on his most determined face. “I let that plane crash into the ice because my mission was complete. I told Peggy I was going to burn down Hydra for what they did to you and after that was done, there was nothing left for me.” The words flowed out so practiced that Bucky realized Steve had been waiting a very long time to tell him this. 

“Don’t be stupid,” Bucky said, voice rougher than he wanted it to be, “you had plenty to live for, and not least of all Peggy Carter.”

Steve shrugged, hands between his knees. “When I had nothing, I had you, and without you I had nothing.”

“Steve,” Bucky said strained. “How can you think that? You’re Captain America, you’ve got the entire country, the entire world.”

Steve shook his head. “Nah. I didn’t become Captain America for the world, Bucky, weren’t you listening earlier? I became Captain America to be at your side. When you weren’t there anymore, I didn’t want to be either.” 

“Jesus, Steve,” Bucky cursed, but Steve interrupted him, a hand pressing warmly against Bucky’s chest to stop him, to make him let Steve finish. 

“And when we were on the ship, I thought I knew why I had been pulled out of the ice. Because I let you down, I let you fall, so it was only right that you be the one to – Hill asked where I was, they would have come to get me from that flaming hunk of metal, but that wasn’t how I wanted to go down. I wanted to go down with you.”

“Steve,” it came out as nothing more than a groan. Bucky grabbed Steve by the back of the head and crashed their lips together so hard it hurt. It wasn’t gentle, it wasn’t sweet, it was desperate, it was clawing because their love wasn’t gentle or sweet either. Their love was violent, it was claiming, and it was all consuming. 

It was the kind of love that should have been terrifying. Bucky wasn’t scared though. He was secure, he was safe, wrapped up with Steve, their feet kicking into each other to divest themselves of their shoes, hands grasping and shoving to press themselves against warm flesh, their mouths biting and wet. 

Their love wasn’t perfect, it wasn’t beautiful, but it was real. So Bucky figured the rest didn’t matter so much. They’d tear the world apart to be together, but they weren’t the only ones. The twins were in the next room, twined together in sleep with a love bright enough to burn red and swift enough to dodge a bullet. Some love was blood, like Pietro said, and some was more. Some love was soul split in half, carried between two people.

**Author's Note:**

> [Tumblr](http://www.blueeyeschina.tumblr.com)


End file.
